Abstract
Ortega y Gasset once defined barbarism as “the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.” 1 Barbarism in the sense of an absence of intellectual standards characterizes much of contemporary development economics and, to a lesser extent, other branches of economics. Economists holding senior academic positions confuse free goods and scarce resources, systematically ignore the price-dependence of supply and demand, or neglect patent and pertinent evidence. Many of these transgressions exhibit a disregard of elementary canons of logic or an inconsistency with basic tenets of economics.
Presented at the First Annual Interlaken Seminar on Analysis and Ideology, Switzerland, June, 1974. A similar paper appears in Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Volkswirtschaft und Statistik, III 1975: 297–316.
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Notes
José Ortega José Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1932), p. 79.
Paul A. Samuelson, Economics: An Introductory Analysis, 2d ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951), p. 49.
Dan Usher, The Price Mechanism and the Meaning of National Income Statistics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968).
Gunnar Myrdal, An International Economy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956), p. 270.
Max F. Millikan and Walt W. Rostow, A Proposal (New York: Harper 1957), where the authors seriously propose that, if per capita incomes in an 1dc rise by between 1 and 2 percent per annum for five years, that country can be assumed to be on the point of takeoff (whatever that means) and should receive as much foreign aid as it can absorb—that is, in practice, unlimited amounts. This proposal thus treats a scarce resource as if it were a free good. Moreover, it advocates most far-reaching policies on the basis of estimates of changes in per capita incomes in ldc’s of 1 or 2 percent when in fact such statistics are subject to margins of errors of several hundred percent. The notion that changes in per capita incomes in these countries can be assessed within 1 percent reveals total unfamiliarity with conditions there.
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, The Economic Development of Nigeria (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1955). The prospects of Nigerian agriculture were a main theme of the report, which reviewed a long list of factors affecting production—including, for instance, agricultural services, water supply, and plant diseases. The price received by farmers was not mentioned in the report’s list of determinants of agricultural output even though this was especially pertinent in the context, both because in Nigeria producer prices were prescribed by the official export monopolies and because the substantial costs of production and transport of export crops ensured that supply must be affected by producer prices.
Gunnar Myrdal, Development and Underdevelopment (Cairo: National Bank of Egypt, 1956), pp. 63, 65 (italics in the original).
H. Kitamura, “Foreign Trade Problems in Planned Economic Development,” in Economic Deevelopment with Special Reference to East Asia, ed. Kenneth Berril (London: Macmillan and Co., 1964), p. 202.
P. C. Mahalanobis, “Draft Plan Frame for the Second Five-Year Plan.” In Papers Relating to the Second Five-Year Plan (Delhi: Government of India Planning Commission, 1955), p. 43.
Baran, The Political Economy of Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957), pp. 249–250; 177.
I. Potekhin, Problemsoj Economic Independence of African Countries (Moscow: Academy of Sciences, 1962), pp. 14–15.
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© 1979 University of Rochester Center for Research in Government Policy and Business
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Bauer, P.T. (1979). Development Economics: Intellectual Barbarism. In: Brunner, K. (eds) Economics Social Institutions. Rochester Studies in Economics and Policy Issues, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9257-3_3
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